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October 25, 2019

George Ernsberger - Columnist
Posted 10/25/19

GRAND UNION: STORIES by Zadie Smith (Penguin). In the interest of seeming serious-minded, I resist inserting “the great” before her name, there; she is great, but that would be just show-offy of …

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October 25, 2019

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GRAND UNION: STORIES by Zadie Smith (Penguin). In the interest of seeming serious-minded, I resist inserting “the great” before her name, there; she is great, but that would be just show-offy of me. Smith is more and more inclined to experiment in her more recent novels, varying styles, both sentence-by-sentence style and at the more radical level of narrative strategies. Here, in her first collection of stories, she even dances into and out of categories and forms—very fine conventional literary short stories, almost-memoirs, a sort of science fiction and other sorts of fantasy, but also short pieces that a different author might have refined into long-ish poems. There is, as always, not a sentence here that wouldn't strike us as brilliant in anyone else's prose; hardly a character we'd meet in anyone else's pages; but it's all just the great Zadie Smith, as surprising and rewarding as ever.

LIVING WITH THE GODS: On Beliefs and Peoples (Vintage). Big, beautiful, lavishly produced paperback—fully illustrated throughout, including with much color—by the author of the classic in this line of serious popular history, A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 100 OBJECTS. This one is, as that one was, a history of art, rather than, in this case, a book of comparative religion—or so the author claims and presumably believes. But it will establish (if it needs establishing) and enrich your understanding of both of those bodies of knowledge. It almost incidentally demonstrates how every political culture (as well as the rest of it) has one of its roots in faith. (In this season, it might be kept in mind for a stocking-stuffer—it's just $22.)

A BITTER FEAST by Debora Crombie (Morrow). This great mystery series—this is the London police detectives, Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid—takes a turn, here. Still crime fiction, death and detection, but the couple are on holiday with their kids in the Cotswolds, and become entangled with a local murder case—that turns into cases, and entangles and endangers one of them.

THE LYING ROOM by Nicci French (Morrow). French's first stand-alone thriller in I think it's 10 years (8 novels with Dr. Friedman), and she's (well, really it's a team) back to “her” former self—maybe better? Probably not, but this was, then, a very good psychological suspense brand name, and this new one certainly upholds it. Not the first of the heroines of these novels to have some rough edges—this is a respectable wife and mother having an affair and finding her lover dead, and creating even more trouble for herself in response. Plotting is ingenious, with multiple twists (maybe it helps to have two authors) and characters are credibly smart and troubled and still likable, worth rooting for—and in this one, a dark sort of comedy cocks an eyebrow once in a while.

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